Because to him, in the end, it was all about loyalty: about making a decision to accept somebody else with their warts and eccentricities. Saying: you are mine, whatever comes. I will love you, whatever comes. But even though she had said she loved him, she never could take that final step, make that ultimate commitment. The apartment was the symbol of that fact.
She has chimes hanging in the corner that tinkle when the AC or heat cuts on. They are silent now. Motes dance in the sunlight coming through the kitchen window. The kitchen is just a walk-in area, barely large enough to turn around in. The refrigerator hums; the clock on the stove shows the correct time.
A glass and two spoons are in the sink, unwashed.
He thought it was the childhood she had gone through that made her so untrusting and cynical. She had seen guys flit in and out of her mother's life, but nobody stayed. What loyalty there? He had thought he could change her, win her over, but he guesses he never quite had. He sighs and heads into the bedroom.
He can smell her in the bedroom, and when he does he realizes that the entire apartment smells like her, though only very faintly in the living room. But very strongly here.
The room holds just a big bed and night stand and a long dresser with a mirror. All mahogany, a matching set with headboard. Exercise bike in the corner. A picture of her mother is on the nightstand. One of him and her on the dresser. He likes that. It is the only sign of him he has seen so far in the place. A guy had brought one of those portable climbing walls to the seawall, and they had dared each other to go to the top. This had been not long after they had first met, and Renee hadn't known yet that he was an experienced, if infrequent, climber. She had started it, egging him on, and he had taken it from there till she had been roped up and scrambling up the wall.
She had no experience, but if there was one thing she wasn't it was a quitter, and after several tense moments in tough spots, she had climbed the thing and been lowered on down, beaming at him with a smirky, triumphant smile. She was nothing if not game. That was another thing he loved about her. When he went up like a squirrel chasing a nut and came sliding back down, she had known something wasn't right and had laughed like an idiot when he told her he had forgotten to mention he was a climber. That was when they had the guy that ran the wall snap the photo. Both of them flushed and laughing and triumphant. He picks it up and looks at it. Can see no sign of death there. Both of them as alive as they can be.
A tear trickles down his face and he flicks it off. He doesn't want to cry looking at her in this photo. She is celebrating the moment, and so will he.
After a minute he starts opening the dresser drawers, one by one, and looking through them. He shifts the clothing around enough to make sure nothing is hidden underneath it then moves it back where it belongs. The scent of her is strongest in her panty drawer. He holds a pair up, puts them back. He has memories of her walking through the house with just this pair of panties on. She liked that, liked to roam around with just the bottoms on after they had sex, raiding the fridge or using the remote to check out what was on the tube. Her breasts were small and pert and seemed gravity-defying to Blaine. Most guys he had known liked bigger breasts, but he never had. Hers were perfect as far as he was concerned, in perfect balance. It seemed somehow to him that a woman with big breasts needed to have a big ass just to balance them. Her ass hadn't been that big. It had been Goldilocks right.
He finishes looking through the drawers, finding nothing of interest, just more clothes. If she had dated other men, at least their pictures were nowhere to be found. He must have had some special place in her heart.
He opens the walk-in closet. Lots of shoes and a rack of dresses. Stuff neatly stacked on the shelf. Stowed away. Nothing that looks like it will be of help to him. He doesn't want to stay in here too long.
He moves back to the kitchen, rifles through the drawers till he finds the inevitable one filled with assorted junk. He thinks everybody must have one of these. He does. There is a tape measure, two extension cords: batteries, pens, tacks, twisty-ties. Paperwork for her flat screen and the sound system. A couple of matchbooks from a joint down near here: Limbada's. He looks at those: opens them, shuts them again and studies the cover. It is a club on the beach in her end of town that draws a big crowd on weekends, mostly younger singles and such. Scroungy grunge music down on the sand. That kind of thing. They had never been in there together. He didn't much like that sort of action. Too much noise and too wild. He was getting past all that. Ten years back he would have been going, but not now. He sticks the matches in his pocket. Quickly looks through the other drawers in the kitchen, the pantry cabinet. Nothing. No spare phone, no address book, no pictures of other guys. He doesn't know any more than he had when he walked in. Except for the matchbook, which probably didn't mean a damn thing. Only in the movies that some tiny clue led to the solving of the big mystery, only in Sherlock Holmes and that sort of fictional drama.
He makes a perfunctory check of the bathroom, but of course, nothing is in there. He seems to remember she had a photo album or two but hadn't seen those. Maybe he had missed them, or more likely her mother had picked them up. Probably the only things in this place she would want. He looks around again, goes to the bedroom door. It doesn't seem like very much to represent a life. He takes a deep breath, inhales her smell again. Looks at the picture on the dresser, debates taking it with him, but he has a copy too. If she had been having some type of wild affair with another man, he had found no evidence of that. He moves to the curtains and peeks out from the side at the lot and the apartments opposite. A couple of small kids are playing on bikes with training wheels, on the pavement across. Nobody else. He opens the door and slides out, locking it as he goes, and sticks the key back in the bottom of the pot, heads for the truck.
Chapter 25
When Blaine wakes up the next morning his head is throbbing. The first thing he does after brushing his teeth is to head over to the computer. He wants to look at some more stuff on near-death. When the screen comes up, he checks the day and date automatically, without much thought, then comes back to it. That's not right, he thinks. The day and date shown weren't today. They were the date of Renee's death. That's sick, he thinks. Must be some kind of glitch. So he picks another web page, and it shows the same. What the hell? For just a second he thinks Todd, then dismisses that immediately. Todd would never do a joke about something like this. He had his limits. He loved good fun but no …
He hollers for him, but Todd is up and has headed out somewhere. Blaine pulls up the bank site and checks that. They give out the date and time automatically. They match what the screen in front of him now shows.
He is sitting there confused, trying to puzzle it out when Todd comes through the front door.
"Hey," he says, "You ready to get in the water?"
Blaine just looks at him, shrugs his shoulders, and when he does, realizes the soreness from the big day out a few days back on the day of Renee's death, when they had surfed all day long, is gone. Maybe it just faded away.
"Sure," he says looking up at Todd, "Why not?" He is beginning to have the small seed of a hope blooming up inside his chest. Could it be that the last few days were some awful nightmare? He certainly has wished that wish numerous times, though he knows inside that thoughts really have no effect on material things. Do they?
"You all right, man?" Todd says, walking past him, taking his button-down shirt off, doubtless to change it for a Tee.
"Right," Blaine says absently after a brief pause. He knows what is happening here isn't possible, but he is damned if he will mess it up. If it is some variety of dream let it continue. It feels awfully real though. His mind is reeling. How could it be real after the last few days? They were not a dream, or more accurately, a nightmare. Dreams always had the hazy edges: that feel of unreality, though he had dreamed some that seemed very real. The last few days hadn't felt like that at all. They had been as real as real could be. But so did this seem right now. Coul
d his sorrow at Renee's death be causing him to hallucinate? Could his wish for her to be alive have caused him to retreat from reality? He stares down at his hands, flexes his fingers, pops his knuckles. Feels real. What about news from the last few days? His mind races, trying to remember what he has read or seen on the tube that would verify them, but after a minute he shakes his head. He hasn't looked at the news in a number of days. He has been sunk into the greatest depression of his life. He hasn't given a damn about the news.
He heads into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror, but he looks the same way he always does, more or less. He is tanned, but he had already been tan. His eyes are clear; he doesn't look crazy. He retreats back to the computer, checks the screen again. It still shows the same date, the date of Renee's death.
Or maybe not sneaks into his mind unbidden, but he pushes it away. Not because he doesn't want it to be true, but because he wants it too much. He doesn't dare hope. He wouldn't be able to take it if it weren't true. He couldn't take it the first time. Life isn't like that, he thinks disjointedly. You don't get do-overs.
He has risen from the captain's chair that sits in front of the computer and is pacing, still looking at the screen, head whirling. What's the strongest thing we hold onto, he thinks. Our sense of reality. Because if you don't have reality, what have you got? Though people will try and twist it to fit their desires. Could he have been drugged? No way, he thinks right away. What drug could induce those feelings of reality? What about his time with Renee's mother? What about the conversations with Nielson? He hadn't imagined those things, not in any way he knew. He knew that memories faded, turned into generalizations as years passed, but those memories were as fresh and real as any he had.
He is breathing hard, working hard, because he is questioning his own sanity here, his grasp on the world around him. Maybe any second he will wake and wonder at his efforts to hide from Renee's death, wonder at the lengths a mind will take.
What are the possibilities? He thinks. If this is real now, then Renee's death might not be. If that was real then, I am having some manner of delusion now. Delusion now or delusion then, something is terribly wrong with my grasp of reality.
Could it be the accident? What if he had suffered some type of brain damage that they hadn't caught with the tests? He thinks back to the tests that Penfield had done with some patients undergoing brain surgery with their skulls open. He had touched electrodes to certain spots in their brains and they had relived experiences just like they were occurring again, heard sounds and songs, felt certain feelings just like they had felt them in reality. Possible, he supposes. It certainly had happened to them.
He recalls some story about a man who dreamed he was a butterfly and asked if that was the reality, or if maybe he was a butterfly that was dreaming he was a man. How would he know?
And that is really the 64,000 dollar question, he thinks. If what I am experiencing now is true, then Renee's death on that day could be a delusion. Either deluded then or I am deluded now. Psychosis is the medical term, he believes. Either way there is a period of delusion that feels real. A disconnection from reality.
He can think of no real reason he would have a delusion about her death. It was true he had some ambivalence about the relationship, but not that style of ambivalence. Not the kind that would make you desert reality. Much more likely that he is deluding himself now, unable to accept her death. Or that could all be psychobabble bullshit. Why should you get to pick your delusion?
He shouts at himself inwardly: focus. He zeroes in on his breath, tries to follow the stream in and out, in and out. Calm down, he thinks. Leave it all for a minute. In and out. In and out. Breathe.
So what has he really got for evidence right now? Besides wishful thinking. The computer screen? The fact that Todd wants to go surfing?
What he needs is more confirmation. He could call Renee's phone. If one version is true, it will ring in a police station evidence bag. If the other is true, she might answer. He takes a deep breath. He can't make himself do that. Yet.
His brother is in the other room. Get him in here and feel him out. If what looks like it is true on the computer is true, then he will be ready to go surfing and to the bar to see Renee tonight. If it is not, then at least Blaine will be partially ready for that. He doesn't have to reveal that he could be crazy. Hell, Blaine thinks, one way or the other, he is definitely having some reality issues, no question about that. But he doesn't have to let Todd or anybody else know that. Shouldn't be too hard to bring up Renee and see where he stands on that. He takes another deep breath and hollers, "Todd!"
His brother appears in the doorway in baggies and a Tee, dressed for the beach. "We going or not, bro? We're burning daylight."
Chapter 26
But when he glances back at the computer, it is showing the date to be the fourth day after Renee's death: today. He sees his watch sitting on the table, checks it. It does too. He puts his head in his hands, takes a deep, sobbing breath. Behind him he hears Todd then feels hands on his shoulders.
"It's all right, man." Todd says. "Let it out. I know you loved that girl."
And just like that his doubts are answered. He sneaks another look at the screen. Still four days after. How could your mind play tricks on you like that? Really, though, it was nothing. He had read some documented stories about people who saw loved ones after they died. Not as uncommon as you might think. Real as real could be to the person experiencing it, too. They'd see them flitting up the halls or poking their heads through doorways. Especially couples who had lived together for many years. It was like they were so accustomed to seeing their partner that they manufactured them if they weren't really there.
His brother bends down and hugs him from behind, as he sits at the computer, head bowed, then straightens up, says "Do you want to talk about it?" Blaine shakes his head and Todd says, "I'll be outside getting the boards and pulling the truck out." And he is gone, back door slamming behind him. Blaine hears the garage door open and after a minute the rumble of the Dodge. He takes another deep breath. Focus.
He is thinking about the detective and Renee's mother. Something about the detective's attitude and the case bothers him. It's not like he doesn't care, it's his focus on it. To Blaine he doesn't seem to be doing all the things that you should be doing for a murder. The DNA thing is just one example. The sketch is another. Something doesn't ring true. And Renee's mom. She seemed torn up; that was true enough, but there was a tension about her that didn't equate. Sorrow yes, but why the tension, as if she were under some type of pressure. And the grief and sorrow from her were not of the magnitude that he would have figured. With all the issues about her upbringing, and no father figure and the different men her mother had been involved with, it was easy to forget that her mother had scratched and clawed to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. He knows their relationship had been very strong. And the deal with the body. He had wanted to see her, still wants to, no matter what she looks like. He had been taken back at Charlene's refusal. It just didn't seem like her.
A horn honks, and he goes to the back door and hollers at Todd to go on without him. His brother stares at him silently for a minute, then nods and guns the big truck down the drive. He looks at the blueness of the sky for a moment, smells the faintly bitter exhaust of the truck and listens to the south wind move through the trees in the yard. The dog in the next yard barks. Over the cedar fence, he can see clothes hanging from the neighbor's line. Not much of that going on these days. She is an ecology nut, always trying to save water or energy. Drives a Prius.
He goes back inside, listens to the miniature grandfather clock hanging on the wall tick for a moment, makes some coffee and sits back down at the computer. The date on the screen reflects the time that has passed since Renee's death. He thinks about that. He recalls somebody somewhere speaking about a loved one's death. They had been asked if they were feeling better, had said something about never really feeling better. Wasn't
the kind of thing you got over. It was the kind of thing that was always in the back of your mind, even after time had passed and you had gone back to the normal routine. It was like a dull ache in your soul instead of your body. That was how he felt. It just didn't seem like something he was going to shake off.
Renee's mom and Detective Nielson circle around the edge of his consciousness as he drinks his coffee. Too much tension and wrong direction. Astute judgments from a guy who is hallucinating dates on a computer screen, he thinks. But still.
He noodles around with this and that listlessly on the computer for a while, then gets dressed in jeans and a sports shirt and is about to call a cab, when he hears the Beast rumble back up the drive. Outside, Todd is spraying off stuff with the hose when he goes out the back door.
"Didn't stay out long," he says to Todd.
"No waves," his brother says. "Just ripples." His blue eyes are steady on Blaine, take in the jeans and shirt. "You want some company, man?"
"No, I'm good. Just need to run a few errands."
"Okay."
Blaine knows Todd is worried about him. He doesn't look back up as Blaine rolls back out the drive, focused on washing the salt and sand off his stuff. He is trying to hide it, act like all is cool, but he is concerned. Blaine knows he hasn't been the paragon of normalcy. He is probably pushing that envelope fairly hard. Hallucinations. Emotional outbursts. Irrational actions. He doesn't give a damn. Something is wrong with this picture. His gut is telling him that.
Nielson is in his office, on the phone, looking out that tiny window, and swivels his chair and looks up when Blaine looms in the doorway. He is chewing on the glasses again. He does not look happy to see Blaine. Or maybe it's the conversation. He puts up a finger, swivels back to the window, listens intently for a moment then says a few short words into the receiver that Blaine can't quite make out. Finally he hangs up and swivels back to Blaine.
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